Ed Notes Extended

Friday, January 13, 2023

Republicans, UFT/AFT Hate Medicare - but not always - Unity at City Council Hearings Beg to Keep Medicare as their caucus tries to take it away

Adams’s cynical attempt to load the dice so that they always come up snake eyes for retirees was evident in the pleas of a handful of cancer victims so desperate to stay out of Medicare Advantage that they demanded Council members change the law so they could pay for the Medicare/Senior Care plan they currently get for free.  ..

Marc Kagan: Is Adams’ Medicare Advantage ploy ‘a game of chicken?’ - The Chief

These pleas were coming from UFT/UNity Caucus retirees, all of whom have been on the UFT payroll and may still be.It's an old comparison but recall the old joke about the guy who kills his parents and pleads for mercy on the grounds he was an orphan. 

Friday, Jan. 13

 


One of the more astounding events at the NYC City Council hearings on Jan. 9 was the testimony of 4 long-time UFT/Unity Caucus members who were part of the UFT/Unity machine for decades pleading to have the admin code changed so they could choose to opt out of the Medicare Advantage plan Michael Mulgrew has been touting as the best plan in the history of the world - he testified earlier by Zoom (not wanting to hear the jeers of UFT retirees in person). 

So here have these Unity stalwarts telling the council the positions they held in the UFT and also detailing their illnesses and how they fear being put into a Medicare Advantage plan advocated by their own union -- and please allow us to pay to put out by changing the code -- even if many UFT members with lower pensions could not opt out.

Really astounding performance. As they left one of them said to me "I want my choice."

If you look at the UFT official position in pushing a Medicare Advantage program, we see they fundamentally line up with some Republicans and the corp dem party.

The AFT and UFT are taking contrary positions to what they proclaimed in the past -- watch what they do not what they say:
 
Paul Krugman has a column today asking

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/opinion/why-republican-politicians-still-hate-medicare.html

 self-identified Republicans say that they are vehemently opposed to “socialism.” But when an Economist/YouGov poll asked them which programs they considered socialistic, none of the big-ticket items made the cut. Social Security? Not socialism. Medicare — which is, by the way, a single-payer national health insurance program, which we’re often told Americans would never accept — also isn’t socialism.

A Scam of the Century: What’s Wrong with Medicare Advantage? Everything

 

5 comments:

  1. Just finished reading this article by Krugman a few minutes ago. The section that most resonated was:
    “Here’s what I think is going on: Even now many, perhaps most Republicans in Congress aren’t culture-war zealots. Instead, they’re careerists who depend, both for campaign contributions and for post-Congress career prospects, on the same billionaires who have supported right-wing economic ideology for decades. They won’t stand up to the crazies and conspiracy theorists, but their own agenda is still tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor and middle class.”
    The UFT folks you mentioned were afraid of being forced into a MA plan that they:
    • were complicit in supporting (and perhaps were once actively engineering,)
    • are only too willing to oblige their less-economically-secure (former) colleagues (rank-and-file retirees) to accept, while they opt-out to a supplement(al) safety net.

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  2. How are we not standing against the vaccine mandates when the vaccines have been shown not to help anything with Covid. Also very dangerous as the CDC and many doctors and scientists have pointed out. I guess for teachers that read this it’s more important to play politics and be good little Democrats tend to actually stand by the science and stand for teachers that actually got fired because they weren’t one of them.

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    1. im Not for firing people. But to argue the vax has no value is propaganda. The numbers show more people die or are hospitalized who don’t get vaxed. Look at China. They barely vaxed. Must be lovely there. They’re not democrats either so it lines up with your politics.

      Delete
    2. Thank you Anonymous 4:41:00 p.m. EST. January 14, 2023

      Delete
  3. I am not firing people. but to argue the vax has no value is propaganda. The numbers show more people die or are hospitalized who do not get vaxed. I look forward to your next post.
    The Posting Here

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